History

Capital Punishment

• The officially authorized execution of the death penalty on persons determined by appropriate legal procedures to have committed a criminal offense. So defined, capital punishment is presently a prominent feature of the administration of criminal justice in many nations of the world and has typically, although not invariably, characterized the criminal law since the beginnings of recorded history. (Wenzel)

• Capital punishment was brought to North America by the colonizing powers. In the American colonies legislation characteristically applied the death penalty to a long list of offenses, and in most colonies executions were frequently carried out. In the years following the American Revolution the number of offenses punishable by death declined. One manifestation of this tendency was the Pennsylvania statute of 1794, which for the first time divided murder into degrees and authorized capital punishment only for first-degree murder. Similar legislation has been enacted in most American states. (Wenzel)
• There has been agitation for the abolition of capital punishment in the United States for more than a century and a quarter. The first state to abolish the death penalty (except in cases of treason) was Michigan in 1847. Other states that have abolished the death penalty in all, or virtually all, cases include Rhode Island (1852), Wisconsin (1853), Maine (1876, 1887), Minnesota (1911), North Dakota (1915), Alaska (1957), Hawaii (1957), Oregon (1964), Iowa (1965), Vermont (1965), West Virginia (1965), and New York (1965). Both Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands have also abandoned capital punishment. A number of states, including Kansas, South Dakota, and Delaware, at one time abolished the penalty and later restored it. The federal government applies the death penalty to a variety of offenses. (Wenzel)
• In the considerable majority of American states that have retained the death penalty, there is some diversity in the offenses to which it is applied. Capital punishment is most commonly applied to murder and treason, but no executions under state authority have occurred for the latter offense in the modern period. Other offenses to which the death penalty has been attached by some American jurisdictions include forcible rape, kidnaping, armed robbery, certain narcotics crimes, and (in the case of the federal government) espionage and theft of military secrets.(Wenzel)
• In spite of the only moderate success of the American abolition movement, the actual execution of the death penalty has declined precipitously for more than a generation and a half. Thus, between 1930 and 1964, 3,849 persons were executed under civil authority in the United States (U.S. Bureau of Prisons 1964). The nature of the decline is revealed by the fact that in 1930, 155 persons were executed, whereas in 1964 the figure was only 15. Considerable regional variations may be observed in the number of executions. In the years 1950–1954, 27 persons were put to death in the populous state of New York, while 72 persons were executed during the same period in Georgia. No executions occurred in the 1950s and 1960s in the states of Massachusetts, South Dakota, Delaware, Montana, and Wyoming. (Wenzel)
• Ancient Practices. Capital punishment existed in the legal codes of the ancient Middle Eastern kingdoms. These codes commonly prescribed death for homicide and for some religious or sexual offenses. Thus, for Israel, it was declared that "whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed" (Gn 9.6) and further that "you shall not let the sorceress live. Anyone who lies with an animal shall be put to death. Whoever sacrifices to any god, except to the Lord alone, shall be doomed" (Ex 22.17–19). The law of the Israelites at one time or another listed as capital crimes homicide, bearing false witness in a capital charge, kidnapping, insult or injury to a parent, sexual immorality, witchcraft or magic, idolatry, blasphemy, and sacrilege. Hebrew law clearly distinguished between voluntary and involuntary manslaughter: "When a man kills another after maliciously scheming to do so, you must take him even from my altar and put him to death" (Ex 21.14). It likewise embraced the lex talionis: "If injury ensues, you shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand" (Ex 21.23–24). It is generally understood that this principle of retribution was enunciated not only to sanction stern penalties, but also to protect offenders from excessive punishments. When death was prescribed, the sentence was more often carried out by stoning, although hanging, beheading, strangulation, and burning were also used. Among the Babylonians, the Code of HAMMURABI distinguished between manslaughter and willful homicide and also proclaimed the lex talionis. Death and mutilation were frequent penalties. The Assyrian Code likewise mentioned death and mutilation, but it remains questionable how often such penalties were inflicted. In the Hittite kingdom, death was reserved mainly for crimes committed by slaves or for special crimes against the king. (Wenzel)

• The term capital punishment derives from caput, a word used by the Romans variously to mean the head, the life, or the civil rights of an individual. Roman law also knew the death penalty as the summum supplicium. In addition to death, Roman law looked on perpetual hard labor and banishment (interdictio aquae et ignis et tecti— denial of fire, water, and shelter) as lesser capital punishments. Banishment meant in effect a grave loss of one's civil rights or status (deminutio capitis). During the Republic, death was imposed mainly for crimes among the military. Under the emperors, it became increasingly common as the penalty for a much wider range of offenses. Rome early embraced the lex talionis in its Law of the Twelve Tables (450 B.C.). Ancient Greece and Rome generally looked on homicide, treason, and sacrilege as capitaloffenses. Later Roman law put other crimes, such as arson and false coining, in the same category. The Greeks imposed death in several ways, e.g., sometimes a free man would be permitted to take poison, and a slave would be beaten to death. Roman usages included strangulation, exposure to wild beasts, crucifixion, and the culeus (drowning a condemned man tied up in a sack with a cock, a viper, and a dog). (Wenzel)